How do you create a brain drain and lose your status as eminent destination for scientists and researchers?
The United States seems to be sending out questionnaires to researchers at universities and research institutes outside of the United States, asking them about their political leanings. Dutch universities are strongly advising Dutch researches not to respond to the questionnaires, and warn that they are designed to stifle free speech and independent research through intimidation.
Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) has also warned researchers about the questionnaire. The USGS questionnaire asks, for example, whether the researcher’s organisation works with ‘entities associated with communist, socialist, or totalitarian parties’, whether the research project has taken ‘appropriate measures’ to ‘defend against gender ideology’ and whether the project has ‘measurable benefits for US domestic industries, workforce, or economic sectors’.
↫ Universiteit Leiden
Researchers trying to enter the United States are also facing intimidation tactics, with the United States government going so far as to refuse entry to scientists critical of the Trump regime:
A French scientist was denied entry to the US this month after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, said a French minister.
“I learned with concern that a French researcher who was traveling to a conference near Houston was denied entry to the United States before being expelled,” Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, said in a statement on Monday to Agence France-Presse published by Le Monde.
↫ Robert Mackey at the Guardian
Being denied entry is one thing – being arrested and sent to a string of prisons is another, like this Canadian woman:
Our next stop was Arizona, the San Luis Regional Detention Center. The transfer process lasted 24 hours, a sleepless, grueling ordeal. This time, men were transported with us. Roughly 50 of us were crammed into a prison bus for the next five hours, packed together – women in the front, men in the back. We were bound in chains that wrapped tightly around our waists, with our cuffed hands secured to our bodies and shackles restraining our feet, forcing every movement into a slow, clinking struggle.
↫ Jasmine Mooney at the Guardian
If you’re a scientist or researcher planning on going to a conference in the US (or, say, a developer wanting to go to a tech conference), you should reconsider. Even if your papers are in order, you could end up on a plane to a concentration camp in El Salvador before you can even call a lawyer – while being told that any judge standing up for your rights should be impeached.
The United States’ war on free speech, science, and research goes far beyond intimidating individual scientists and researchers. The Trump regime is actively erasing and deleting entire fields of science, most notably anything involving things like climate and gender, and openly attacking and cutting funding to universities that disagree with the Trump regime.
Almost immediately after being sworn in as president on 20 January, Trump put his signature to piles of executive orders cancelling or freezing tens of billions of dollars in funding for research and international assistance, and putting the seal on thousands of lay-offs. Orwellian restrictions have been placed on research, including bans on studies that mention particular words relating to sex and gender, race, disability and other protected characteristics.
↫ Nature
US President Donald Trump’s latest war on the climate includes withdrawing support for any research that mentions the word.
He has also launched a purge on government websites hosting climate data, in an apparent attempt to make the evidence disappear.
↫ Corey J. A. Bradshaw at The Conversation
The Trump administration has fired hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency housed within the Department of Commerce, the Guardian has learned.
[…]
“There is no plan or thought into how to continue to deliver science or service on weather, severe storms and events, conservation and management of our coasts and ocean life and much more,” he said. “Let’s not pretend this is about efficiency, quality of work or cost savings because none of those false justifications are remotely true.”
↫ Dharna Noor and Gabrielle Canon at the Guardian
Intimidating current scientists isn’t enough, either – the scientists of the future must also suffer:
US President Donald Trump has signed an executive orderto dismantle the Department of Education, fulfilling a campaign pledge and a long-cherished goal of some conservatives.
[…]
In its statement, the American Federation of Teachers said: “No-one likes bureaucracy, and everyone’s in favour of more efficiency, so let’s find ways to accomplish that.
“But don’t use a ‘war on woke’ to attack the children living in poverty and the children with disabilities.”
↫ Ana Faguy at the BBC
But what about intimidating university students who don’t fall in line with the regime? Well, we can’t forget about those, now, can we?
After immigration agents detained Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil over his involvement in pro-Palestine protests on campus, President Donald Trump promised it was just the beginning. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has since arrested at least two more students who are in the country on visas — one of whom had recently sued the Trump administration on First Amendment grounds.
↫ Gaby Del Valle at The Verge
A Cornell University PhD student earlier this month sued the Trump administration seeking to stop the president’s order aimed at foreign students accused of “antisemitism”. Days later, lawyers at the justice department emailed to request that the student “surrender” to immigration officials
↫ Maanvi Singh at the Guardian
These are just a small selection of stories, and I could’ve picked a dozen more still if I wanted to. The point should be squarely (roundly?) driven home by now: the United States government seems to be doing everything in its power to scare off the very people an economy based on science, technology, and innovation needs to thrive, and this hasn’t exactly gone by unnoticed in the rest of the world.
It started with individual universities in Europe stepping up to attract US researchers and scientists, like the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium:
The Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) is opening 12 postdoctoral positions for international researchers, with a specific focus on American scholars working in socially significant fields. These prestigious fellowships come with substantial funding (€2.5 million) as part of the European Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) program. Additionally, as part of the Brains for Brussels initiative of Innoviris, VUB aims to actively attract American professors looking to relocate. In collaboration with its Francophone sister university ULB, VUB is also providing 18 apartments for international researchers seeking temporary residence at the Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies.
VUB’s initiative is a response to the alarming political interference in academic research by the Trump administration in the U.S. The university is taking a firm stand against these developments.
↫ Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Another example, the Aix-Marseille Université in France:
In a context where some scientists in the United States may feel threatened or hindered in their research, our university is announcing the launch of the Safe Place For Science program, dedicated to welcoming scientists wishing to pursue their work in an environment conducive to innovation, excellence and academic freedom.
↫ Aix-Marseille Université
It seems universities the world over are seeing an increase in applicants trying to escape the purges in the United States:
Universities around the world have reported seeing an uptick in applications from U.S.-based researchers, who face an increasingly uncertain climate under President Donald Trump’s administration. And some countries and their institutions are already looking to use the opportunity to attract new talent and reverse the steady migration of scientists to the U.S. in recent decades.
↫ Catherine Offord at Science
Governments in Europe soon picked up on this, and are now asking the European Union to launch concerted efforts to attract scientists and researchers fleeing the United States:
In a letter addressed to research commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva on Wednesday and seen by Science|Business, 13 governments asked the EU to show solidarity and welcome “brilliant talents from abroad who might suffer from research interference and ill-motivated and brutal funding cuts.”
“The current international context reminds us that freedom of science can be put at risk anywhere and at any time,” they wrote. While the new US administration is not named in the letter, the implication is clear.
↫ Juliette Portala and David Matthews at Science|Business
Curtailing freedom of speech and attacking academic freedom are classic elements of the authoritarian and fascist playbooks, and the end result is always the same: a massive brain drain as academia are either murdered, sent to work the fields, or in less extreme cases like what’s happening in the United States today, flee the country to offer their knowledge and expertise elsewhere. The effects of brain drain are well-understood, and will impact the economy of the United States harshly; especially the very technology companies supporting the Trump regime will start feeling the squeeze as it becomes harder and harder for them to attract the top talent they need. In fact, they’re already worried about what they have wrought.
Freedom of speech and academic freedom are under heavy assault in the United States, and it’s going to affect every American, from researchers and academics, down to classic cases of “I never thought leopards would eat my face”, like when a Trump voter saw his wife arrested, facing deportation to Peru (he still supports Trump, and doesn’t regret his vote – that’s going to make for interesting dinner conversation).
Authoritarian purges employ hatchets, not scalpels, and every American in the bottom 80% is going to suffer the consequences.
